That doesn’t sound over the top at all. I think that’s a you thing. My parents love to see pics of their grandchildren. The screensaver on their TV used to be the photo album of all the recent kids pics. That feature doesn’t work on their new TV (even though it should) and my dad spent hours trying to make it work to no avail. They would love to get a present like that.
I think it shows stuff from Google Calendar, though I don’t know because I use Outlook primarily.
You can set reminders that gently vibrate with a label on them, and I use those, too, but sometimes I just need an alarm. I almost never read reminders as soon as they come up, so I try not to use those for time critical purposes, but more stuff like (monthly) “reconcile checking account” and (weekly) “clean CPAP.”
An alarm is like, “stop messing around and go get your laundry before you forget it’s in there.” Or, “You’ve forgotten to do this five times already so this time I really mean it.”
I was actually surprised at how many people have a need to do this.
I posted the code to GitHub with a goof proof installer and made a video showing how it worked and how to set it up. It’s all driven by great open-source command-line tools like ImageMagik and LibreOffice, Ghostscript, and pqiv, knit together with a set of scripts that run as services, with Samba providing the “drop box”. Most of my mildly technical videos are lucky to pass 100 views, but this one has 1,200 views so far.
So anyone who wants to set up a simple announcements display with a spare TV:
A DIY, Free-Software Announcements Frame for Churches and Small Shops
My sister bought one of those frames for my mother. Mom loves seeing new pictures of her grandchild pop up randomly. The spirit of this thread was about new technological features that makes things more complicated with very little benefit. I suppose the frames are more complicated than a regular photo, but the benefit seems obvious to me.
All grandparents want is to see pics of their grandchildren. Makes gift-giving so much easier. My husband does a Mixbook (photobook) featuring our son every year and every year his parents and grandmother coo and demand more. I am not a grandparent but I would imagine someone getting random, real-time photos of their grandchildren beamed into their living room is straight euphoria.
Probably especially true if they live far away.
Yep. I want one
Absolutely! Used for their intended purpose, I think these digital frames are a fun and amazing bit of technology to bridge the generations.